Comments on: Pandora’s Box

By: Valvar

Valvar — Mon, 20 Jan 2014 13:31:04 +0000

The whole saga smells funny to me. It doesn’t make sense for someone possessing that much intelligence to act in such a manner. Either your explanation makes sense, or there is an alternative one (among others, perhaps): EY concocted of the whole censorship thing as a way to generate attention to the basilisk and LW.

By: survivingbabel

survivingbabel — Thu, 16 Jan 2014 14:04:28 +0000

@Nick B. Steves

It’s just old wisdom being rediscovered by people absolutely insistent on going the really, really long way around.

* Thoughts themselves can be dangerous without immediate attendant actions
* The path to Enlightenment/Nirvana/Heaven is fraught with peril like logical dead-ends, virulent memes, and general madness
* Therefore, cultivating a strong conscious mind which can channel and control one’s thoughts is an absolute prerequisite to any spiritual/wisdom/fool’s journey path.

Part of the modernist/post-modernist process has been to convince us that the “rich inner life” is a right, and something to which all should aspire. The demands for freedom of conscience never seem to contain the complementary duty to cultivate good thoughts. This was one of my biggest takeaway lessons from Catechism classes: bad thoughts are as much a sin as bad words or deeds.

By: R7 Rocket

R7 Rocket — Thu, 16 Jan 2014 03:54:27 +0000

Hard for the Left to do so when they fail to pay the army and police.

By: Nick B. Steves

Nick B. Steves — Tue, 14 Jan 2014 19:04:53 +0000

If I understood what any of this was about, either the antecedant or Bryce’s apparent hijacking thereof, I might find something witty to say.

By: piwtd

piwtd — Tue, 14 Jan 2014 16:30:01 +0000

The question of how seriously should one take long abstract and from practical reality far detached lines of reasoning is not a trivial one. It is easy to dismiss them altogether as tip-dancing angels, and there is certainly a healthy dose of sober sanity in such a dismissal, but the whole of modern mathematics is based on thinking really rigorously about purely abstract entities. The idea that one could glimpse an insight into the ultimate fate of the universe by contemplating in depth the Newcomb’s paradox does not strike me as that impossible.

Now I don’t lose sleep over Roco’s Basilisk, because even if I were to accept all the assumption of “Timeless Decision Theory” as uncontroversial, the thought that comes to my mind is the following: If polished apes as us can come up with such mind-bending idea as Roco’s Basilisk when contemplating building future AI, just imagine the scale of complexity of “acausal bargaining” the hyper-intelligent AI would be engaged in with hyper-hyper-intelligent AI it plans to built, such bargains would certainly involve meta-bargains about the attitude one has towards acausal bargaining itself which then negates any asumptions about how the AI might bargain with us.

The lesson I take from the whole Basilisk fiasco is the conformation of my previous suspicion that there are some major holes in EY’s worldview. The essence of what it means to be a rationalist is that one prefers knowledge to ignorance, it is better to know even if the truth is horrible. “Sapere aude!” I believe is the slogan. The proper response of someone who is existentially committed to rationalism when encountering the thought of an evil demon who punishes you for thinking rationally about him, is to remain calm, not disintegrate into panic and think rationally about him nonetheless. EY has been tested and he failed.

By: Thos Ward

Thos Ward — Tue, 14 Jan 2014 16:28:20 +0000

I respectfully think you are making a category error, the truth conditionality of the basilisk is not very relevant. There is no shortage of problems with the original post, but that’s not the point really; aesthetics play a huge role in the neoreactionary discourse (this is not a critique). It’s what the whole horror thing is about. Think of it more in terms of speech acts. The content itself is not always all that important, in a very similar way to other performative utterances. Latour does a good job (as usual) discussing the idea below. Neoreactionary discourse supplies arguments, logic, obscurity, mystery, affect, mathematics, history etc into a coherent critical narrative. The method of neoreactionary thought aligns with the the theoretical premise that there is an outside (GNON) whose content is not all known and may not be knowable to, or communicable by, primates. The discourse is *simultaneously* epistemic and constructivist (but what it constructs is indeterminate because it is not defined a priori) This is hugely powerful- at least as powerful as progressivism, likely more so. Because of the ontological commitment to a reality that is not magically subjugated to primate sensory capacities and value preferences, there is a lot of experimentation. (If progressivism is social construction, neoreaction is just construction- maybe of Pythia, or a Basilisk?) The Basilisk may just be a vehicle for ontological horror. It is indeed germinal and allows the possibility to think horrible things. In an Hebbian way, the basilisk may not survive but its progeny may. This is one of the reasons, I think, why neoreaction is so much more attractive than every other critique of progressivism.

http://bruno-latour.fr/sites/default/files/86-FREEZE-RELIGION-GB.pdf

By: Contaminated NEET

Contaminated NEET — Tue, 14 Jan 2014 14:17:17 +0000

Ha! Bravo, Lesser Bull! Like a lot of great ideas, it seems utterly obvious now that you’ve said it, but somehow it hadn’t occurred to anyone yet. We’ve gone from the Rapture of the Nerds, to the Hell of the Nerds, so why not the Unconditional Election of the Nerds?

By: piwtd

piwtd — Tue, 14 Jan 2014 14:13:43 +0000

@Henry Dampier: There is Ben Goertzel.

By: Contaminated NEET

Contaminated NEET — Tue, 14 Jan 2014 14:11:09 +0000

The Pandora/Prometheus thing is great, but as for the rest, either Anarchopapist is completely off his rocker, or I don’t get it at all. Should we aspire to be the memetic cancer in the body politic? Absolutely. Should we take talk of “basilisks” seriously? No way. The value of the Roko’s Basilisk is as a cautionary tale about hubris and worship of Reason. The admittedly very intelligent and supposedly super-rational Eliezer Yudkowsky and his Less Wrong crowd (I’m tempted to say “cult,” and I guess I just did) have publicly humiliated themselves with this ludicrous spaghetti-argument. Point and laugh, don’t dive into the whirlpool after them.

I posted this comment to Anarchopapist’s blog:
“[…] It’s a cliche out here on the alt-right that some kinds of nonsense take a lot education and intelligence to fall for. People being what we are, we see intelligent, educated people buying into this crap, we associate it with intelligence and education, and we start parroting it ourselves to raise our status.

It’s fun to imagine basilisks, and chat about them, and feel dangerous and subversive, but the whole “acausal bargaining” thing is inane. How the hell, and why the hell, does anyone (or any god) keep a bargain that was never made? Look close, and Roko’s Basilisk is nothing but an artifact of Yudkowsky’s “Timeless Decision Theory,” which as far as I can tell, is itself just a cute half-convincing answer to a single paradox/puzzle (“Newcomb’s problem”), which Yudkowsky has hubristically blown up into a huge supposedly-revolutionary answer to everything.

The whole thing smacks of the (apocryphal) Scholastics who so enjoyed arguing about angels dancing on pins. Sure they’re smart, smarter than me at least, but they’ve argued themselves out of all sense.”

Does the emperor really have beautiful new clothes here that I’m just too dense to see? Where am I going wrong?

By: VXXC

VXXC — Tue, 14 Jan 2014 13:36:20 +0000

The Cathedral has it’s Basilik. We must have ours, and hope for the clearer skies of the Baselius.

You cannot have pudding without the stock. There are no proofs for this pudding, it does not exist.

Well done Bruce et al. Please continue. Some journeys must be taken wherever the road leads.